Letting terror win

There is nothing a government in a remotely free country can do to stop a suicide bomber in a crowded space. As a weapon, he has the precision of a drone missile. The only preventive task open to the police and security service is to penetrate and destroy a terrorist cell in advance. This means assiduous intelligence. It has clearly held the key to disarming some 50 ‘terror plots’ known to the police over the past decade.

Every lesson in counter-terrorism warns against overreaction. But David Cameron seems oblivious to this truth. He appears to have no faith in the police to protect British citizens from terrorism. His reaction to the recent bombings in Brussels was to dive into his Cobra ‘bunker’ and emerge declaring that London was ‘under real threat… from appalling terrorists’. An attack on London, he said, was now ‘highly likely’. He has duly put 10,000 troops on standby.